Jane Smiley: Early Warning

He ate one cookie and half the biscuit, rolling bits around in his mouth and then swallowing them.

Finally, she said, “Are you working now?”

“At the stockyards. Omaha.”

“That’s steady work.”

“I shoulda left this place when I first had the chance.”

“When was that, Roland?”

“Was all set up I was going to Chicago to work for a man my father knew in the shoe business. Before the first war. Start by doing the books, then go on the road, selling shoes. Well, my dad died right then, and my uncles hated to see me go, so they made it real easy to get going on the farm. Lorene was my second cousin, you know. From over around Grundy Center, where three of the uncles lived. Oh, they suckered me. Everyone was just scared to death of the sins of the world. Lorene was a good girl — she would watch over my spirit.” And then he put his head down on the table, his old, dirty gray hair right on the little plate, and he started bawling. Rosanna moved the plate. She said, “I’m sure they thought they were acting for the best.”

“They never had any doubt about it. Or about anything else.”

“You were a good farmer. Walter respected you. And Minnie and Lois are both such good girls. There’s more to everyone than meets the eye. But there is what meets the eye, too.”

Roland took a deep snort and sat up, then pulled a dirty bandanna out of his pocket and wiped his nose. Rosanna picked up the plate, carried that and the teapot to the sink. He was out of the room just like that, and she skittered after him, not quite knowing what she would do if he headed up the stairs, but he didn’t. He went straight to the front door and left without another word. Rosanna closed the door behind him.

Through the window, she saw him go down the steps, look around, and make his way to the car parked there — a Ford, maybe a ’48. He sat in it for a long while, and then drove away. The car was gray. She wrote that down on a scrap of paper.

It took her two days to tell Minnie. Really, it was that she didn’t want to see the very thing she saw when she related the incident — Minnie’s nostrils flaring and her eyes hardening.

Minnie said, “He’d better not come back.”

“He might not.”

Rosanna didn’t ask who owned the farm, where the papers were. Worse came to worst, they could vacate the house for a few years, the few years that Roland had to live. She said, “Your father is pretty far down the road now, Minnie.”

“That’s the good news, then.”

“I suppose it is, yes.”

Rosanna never knew if Minnie told Lois or Joe. As for herself, Rosanna thought of telling Granny Elizabeth about it, maybe just as a way of hearing more about Roland’s uncles — she would have a thing or three to say. But in the end she said nothing, feeling each time she opened her mouth that there was some species of betrayal in it.

—

THE TWINS WERE eighteen months old now, walking (and standing and staring and screaming and sitting) just like other children more or less their age, and Andy found herself increasingly preoccupied with those baby scrapbooks her brother’s wife had sent when they were born. Andy had gotten Janny’s to the six-month mark — the last photo was of her sitting up in the baby bath with her fingers in her mouth. Richie’s and Michael’s — not even birth pictures. Birth pictures of the twins existed, but they reminded Andy more of mug shots than of baby photos, naked in incubators, little skinny limbs and odd heads, no hair except where it shouldn’t be, on arms and back, like monkeys. She had stuffed the scrapbooks onto the upper shelf in the closet in Richie and Michael’s room, and every time she slid open that door, she would see their spines, white, pink, and blue, the silliest objects in her very modern house, ready to get thrown out.

But she couldn’t do it. Throwing them out would be giving up forever, acknowledging that her maternal instincts didn’t exist, had never existed, would never exist, no matter how affectionately she spoke to her children, or spoke of her children, no matter that she touched them gently, petting them as if they were cats, smiled at them, nattered on in baby talk like the book said to do, no matter that she followed all of Dr. Spock’s suggestions religiously, the way she had followed rules her whole life. Her mother still laughed about the time when she was eight and they had had a screaming argument about Andy’s cleaning up her room. Her father walked through the kitchen, picked up a piece of stationery, and wrote down the rules (in Norwegian), then tacked them to her door:

1. Elske Gud

2. Adlyd din eldeste

3. Elske din neste

4. Bo ren i kropp og sinn

5. Alltid fortelle sanheten

6. Sett bort sinne

“Love God, respect your elders, love your neighbors, be clean in body and mind, always tell the truth, put away anger.” The joke was that, as soon as they were written down, she followed them to the letter. That paper fluttered on the door of her room for years, a joke to them and a burden to her.

There was so much that she did not know about her children. She could run down the list right now, sitting in the living room with her cigarette in one hand and her ashtray in the other (she always emptied her ashtray after one smoke; she stubbed out the butt over and over until it was cold and flat — what if an ash leapt for the curtains and burned the house down?). She did not know if they were cute. She did not know if they were smart. She did not know if they liked her or each other or Frank. (And what did they really see of Frank? Not much.) She did not know if they were happy or difficult or spoiled or behaving appropriately for their ages. Take this example: Michael, who now weighed twenty-three pounds, twelve ounces, walked past Richie, who weighed twenty-three pounds, eight ounces, and knocked him down. Richie sat suddenly on his bottom and began crying, then threw himself on his back and started kicking his legs. Did Michael mean to knock Richie down? Did he intend Richie to feel pain? Did Richie feel real pain, or was he just angry? When Michael started to cry a few moments later, was he responding to Richie’s tears? Then, when Janny’s door, up the stairs of the half-landing, slammed, was that because she had slammed it? Could a three-year-old slam a door in anger? Andy never had, she was sure. Was Janny angry about something? If there were less crying in this room, would she be able to hear whether Janny slammed her fingers in the door?

Andy stood up from the couch and walked to the bottom of the stairs. She could not hear crying, so probably Janny was all right. She had already asked Janny if she was all right three times since lunch.

She walked over to Richie and set him on his feet. She took him by the hand and led him to the toy box, where she found his favorite book (this she did know — it was The Night Before Christmas ). She opened it to the page where Ma in Her Kerchief and I in My Cap were lying in bed. Richie sat down with a bump and stared at the picture. She could take the boys outside and strip them down and sit them in their little pool — it was a hot day — and she could make sure that there were only two inches of water in the bottom and that she was looking at them every single moment, in case one of them fell over.

The doorbell rang, and Andy leaned forward. She saw Alice Rosen shade her eyes and press her nose and chin to the window beside the door. The bell rang again. The garage door was open, and the Rambler was parked there, so Alice knew she was somewhere nearby. Alice was funny and kind. Maybe it would be good to have Alice come in the back, find her where she was standing, and dose her with a box of cannoli — that was something she often wanted to share. But Andy did not move, and so Alice disappeared. There was the sound of a car leaving. Andy felt the oddest thing: something in her body draining away, as if she had been feeling pleasure or anticipation without knowing it, and now she was disappointed.